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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The power of subsidy

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Here’s a small paradox; in recent weeks I’ve spent a couple of days each in Munich, and in Nice (Sophia Antipolis, in fact) for different events. In the Munich area there is huge enthusiasm for solar energy – driven, to be fair, by a generous government subsidy for purchase, and for selling your surplus power back to the grid. It’s becoming commonplace to see substantial solar-cell arrays along south-facing motorway bankings, and covering the roofs of every type of building.
That, I remind you, was Munich. Somewhat north of 48 degrees, average solar power over the year of about 6.5 kWh/sq.m/day. When the sun shines, which – with all due respect to Munich – isn’t every day.
But in Nice? Where the sun shines most of the time (so the tourist office would have you believe, anyway)? South of 44 degrees, with maybe another whole kWh/sq.m/day, on average (don’t mock, those are the kind of margins that make solar power viable, or not)? Hardly a single cell to be seen, monocrystalline, polycrystalline or any other sort, on any rooftop.
This may go to show the power of committed green thinking as it feeds through from government policy into retail-subsidy. Or it may have something to do with having a large fraction of your national generating base in high-availability nuclear stations, and not having to worry too much about where the rest is going to come from.

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